6 Baffling Video Games Adapted From Famous Movies and Shows

It's easy to see why so many crappy licensed games get made -- your cheap, slapped-together fighting game is going to sell way more copies if you can stick the title Fight Club on it. The problem is that sometimes the programmers are apparently in such a rush to finish the game before the deadline that they don't actually have a chance to watch the show or movie they're basing the game on. So, you wind up with deeply confusing titles like these ...

In the 1990s, Home Improvement was popular enough that it made sense to release a game based on it -- at least until you stopped to think about it and asked yourself, "How do you make a game out of a sitcom about Tim Allen dicking around with tools?" Absolute Entertainment answered that question with a decisive "You don't." So they made this instead:

No, that isn't an illustration for our fan-fiction novella about Tim Allen seducing dinosaurs: There really was a Home Improvement game for the Super Nintendo that sent Allen's character on an adventure across exotic landscapes, all the while grappling with a drill and shooting nail guns and Harry Potter spells at pterodactyls. Apparently the programmers were halfway through the game when they found out Home Improvement isn't that Spielberg movie set in a park.

Astoundingly, there's an explanation for this madness, and it has nothing to do with someone suffering a cocaine relapse: Tim is on the set of his show-within-a-show, Tool Time, when he learns that his special tools have been stolen, so he goes on a tour of various movie sets to recover them. As for why the presumably animatronic dragons and shit are trying to kill him, that's not explained -- it's just assumed that everyone and everything naturally hates Tim Allen.

Absolute Entertainment"We saw The Santa Clause, you inhuman monster."

Although the first part of the game features Tim Allen swinging around the forest like Tarzan while chainsawing prehistoric creatures, the next levels range from an Indiana Jones Mayan temple to the final boss fight, which is a giant robot battle on Mars. If we accept the "This is Tim's coke-fueled fantasy" theory, this is the part where he starts a street fight with a hooker.

Even if you managed to ignore Tim Allen's likeness and tried to enjoy this as just another good old fashioned dinosaur-punching, robot-killing SNES game, it still wasn't worth playing. The gameplay was tedious and the controls were unclear, since the instruction manual was more of a novelty item thanks to this sign in the middle:

Then again, if you bought this game after watching the TV commercial, which showed no gameplay at all, you deserved to be disappointed.

#5. Porky's for Atari Is Frogger With Pixelated Boobs

Fox Video Games"In retrospect, we were a tad hasty awarding 'Game of the Century' without playing literally any other video game."

In case you're one of those people who missed the 1980s entirely, Porky's was a massively successful sex comedy where a bunch of high school students sneaked into a strip club to get laid, got kicked out, and eventually got their revenge by sinking the club in a swamp. Also, at one point they spied on girls in the school locker room and one of the kids got his dick stuck in a hole in the wall. Clearly, with a premise like that, it would have been a huge missed opportunity not to turn this movie into an Atari game.

The game features four levels that adorably try to recreate scenes from the movie using the Atari 2600's finest pixels. First, you have to cross the street Frogger style to get to the titty bar. In a total inversion of the spirit of the original, you actually have to avoid the strippers instead of going after them.

Fox Video Games

If you get hit by anything, you fall into the swamp and have to pole vault your way back up (surprisingly, we're talking about an actual pole).

Fox Video GamesPorky's Strip Club is located on an old nuclear waste burial ground.

The next scene takes place in what is supposedly a gymnasium and features what is supposedly a naked girl taking a shower. Or at least that's what they were going for, according to the manual -- in truth, this looks more like the dungeon where Custer from Custer's Revenge probably keeps his victims.

Fox Video GamesNote that the dick holes aren't even at dick level.

Once you get back to the street and successfully avoid those terrifying strippers, you must climb the scaffold while avoiding Porky himself, and then finally blow up the club.

Fox Video Games"That's what you get for not letting underage kids illegally solicit your strippers for sex, motherfucker!"

And that's it. That's the entire game. You can beat the whole thing in like two minutes. Amazingly, the game was successful enough to be remade on the Atari 800 home computer, albeit with slightly better graphics.

Fox Video Games"Now these are pixels you can be proud to masturbate to!"

#4. March of the Penguins Is a Ridiculous Lemmings Knockoff

Possibly the first game ever based on a French nature documentary, March of the Penguins was released on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance in 2006, a year after the original movie grabbed an Academy Award and broke box office records across the world. The movie, if you haven't seen it, is about the brutal conditions this flock of penguins endures in order to keep their breeding cycle going. Now imagine you're a room full of programmers who have been told they need to make a child-friendly portable video game out of that concept.

The first level, "Journey to the Breeding Ground," has you guiding the lovable penguins to the remote, magical place where they'll make sweet penguin love to one another (aka the other side of the screen). They are marching nonstop, in the most literal sense, and it's up to you to place objects in their path that will alter their movement, like fun trampoline tents, ice slides, ramps, and other elements that suggest the programmers watched a very different, much more insane movie than the one we remember.

The main game is basically that over and over again, with mini-levels peppered in that have you guiding your penguin baby-daddy through a maze of eggs and other tedious penguin-related bullshit. Overall, the implication here seems to be that you're playing the role of an unscrupulous filmmaker jerking some birds around to get the shots he needs for his pretentious "documentary."

DSI GamesWhen an underwater level is your high point, you're in trouble.

We're not saying they should have taken away March of the Penguins' Oscar for endorsing this shit, but they could have at least downgraded it to a Golden Globe.